


A Person In Several Parts

by Epi_girl



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hopeful Ending, I love merle okay, references to other characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-21 23:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14296230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epi_girl/pseuds/Epi_girl
Summary: Merle forgets, remembers, and starts to pick up the pieces.





	A Person In Several Parts

When Lucretia fed those books to Fisher- erased everything, years of improvement and the people that shaped him into a good man, a better man than he was before- Merle becomes... something. Something different.

It’s not a good kind of different, like someone breaking out of their shell, or even the neutral type, like seeing someone you haven’t seen in ages and having them act some other way than how you remember. It’s the bad kind, the kind where something happens and you’re a worse person for it.

He isn’t really whole afterwards, he’s lonely and missing something and he doesn’t know why, so he closes off and covers up with prickly statements and bad jokes and a thin veil of joviality that masks an bitter, insecure, unstable man with no passion for the god he’s been saddled with and a family he doesn’t know how to care about. Something is wrong and he knows it, because leaving Hekuba and the kids behind without a warning and just running away shouldn’t feel right to him. But it does and it makes him more bitter, because what the fuck kind of person feels like that?

Meeting Taako and Magnus fills a kind of void in him and it doesn’t make sense. Because he’s had friends before, of course he has, but none of them ever... clicked like these two do. It’s made all the stranger by how much they seem to hate him sometimes, too. But they work with him, make sense to him in a way that no one else has in a long, long time. Maybe ever.

 

_He has dreams sometimes, terrifying dreams that are far too familiar where he sits at a table with a void of static in front of him, and towards the end every time he swears he can see the vague shape of a well-dressed man._

 

After Phandalin, the mess that that whole scenario was, he finds two more people who... make sense. Davenport and Lucretia, the Director and her assistant, they click in his head just like Taako and Magnus did, and it’s confusing because he’s never met these kinda intimidating people before, but he feels less empty after they meet and has no idea why. And the Voidfish ichor? Pan help him, the stuff feels so familiar that it’s frustrating.

Even so, he still feels wrong, like he’s not a whole person yet, or maybe never has been. So the bad feelings stick around and he laughs at his failure and prays to the deity he barely cares about that he won’t be replaced by any number of the people he meets as they keep on working with the Bureau. He doesn’t want to lose the two people that make him feel more complete than the shell of a dwarf he’s been for so damn long.

They keep going and the relics are familiar too, and so is the lich, and he just gets more and more irritated because it’s like something is always pressing up against his mind, as though an explanation is just on the edge of his consciousness and he can’t quite grasp it. But he keeps going, feeling a sad kind of angry and so utterly perplexed and just wanting to know why the fuck he feels this way all the time.

 

_The baby Voidfish’s ichor flooding his mind with reasons for all this and important things, people he forgot is such a relief it almost makes him want to cry._

-*-*-*-

Even after Merle remembers, can recall those hundred years aboard the Starblaster, knows why Davenport and Taako and Lucretia and Magnus just made so much sense to him, he’s still not quite complete.

He’s got all the pieces, sure, but his mind is strange, fuzzy and there are some he doesn’t quite know how to fit into the story, and so something always feels as though it’s missing.

But in the aftermath of it all, Merle lets himself feel like that, because given what he’s seen, what’s happened to him, all that jazz- he deserves a little time to sort himself out.

He isn’t perfect and has never been and never will be because that’s unattainable, but he’s alright with that fact, because he knows that he’ll be alright at some point, and that there are people that can help him through.

 

He can rebuild himself.

One step at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> I should be working on my multi chapter stuff yikes 
> 
> This is just self indulgent lmao
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


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